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Douglas Rushkoff On The Harmful Effects Of Technology On Our Future – This Week’s Six Pixels of Separation Podcast

Episode #850 of Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

I’ve said it before… I will say it again: Douglas Rushkoff is – without a doubt – one of the smartest humans beings on this earth that I get to call a friend. Douglas is back with another compelling book about technology and how it could impact us (in a very negative way) if we don’t start making serious moves… right away. The new book is called, Survival of the Richest – Escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, and it goes well below the depth of bunkers that these tech billionaires have built to save themselves should everything sideways. In this book, Doug traces the origins of The Mindset in science and technology through its current expression in missions to Mars, island bunkers, AI futurism, and the metaverse. In a dozen urgent, electrifying chapters, he confronts tech utopianism, the datafication of all human interaction, and the exploitation of that data by corporations. Through fascinating characters — master programmers who want to remake the world from scratch as if redesigning a video game and bankers who return from Burning Man convinced that incentivized capitalism is the solution to environmental disasters — Doug explores why those with the most power to change our current trajectory have no interest in doing so. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, Doug is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He hosts the popular Team Human podcast, Rushkoff has written twenty books, including the bestsellers Team Human, Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed. He is also the person who made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like and The Merchants of Cool. Douglas coined such concepts as “viral media” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a professor of media theory and digital economics. Let’s dig into the present and future of tech. Enjoy the conversation…

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via Apple Podcast or whatever platform you may choose): #850 of Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast.

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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.